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Shane Snow, author and entrepreneur of a fast-growing company, admits it seemed a bit insane that just a few years into co-founding a media based SaaS company, with serious V.C. investors ($11 million raise), two dozen staff and “a large percentage of the Fortune 500” as clients, he should take the time to write a book. As a reporter and writer he became convinced “that this ‘hacker thinking’ I’d identified in my stories … was not endemic to tech startups, but had been employed long before them by some of the most interesting groups in history.” Snow wanted to understand how this phenomenon worked more globally. Eventually, this very busy Chief Creative Officer and co-founder of Contently published Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success “What did Ben Franklin, The Second City comedy school, and history’s fastest-growing media company have in common?” asks Snow. “Their unconventional success follows a set of patterns that research finds among overachieving people and companies across industries. Boiled down: history indicates that regardless of the industry or discipline, whenever there’s ‘The Way It’s Done,’ someone eventually comes along and finds a smarter way, and that’s how innovation and above-average growth happens.” But are the cobbler’s children going shoeless? Apparently not. In a recent email interview, Snow explains how he and his co-founders practically apply his research to the running of Contently. Rapid Testing. Snow writes in Smartcuts about traditional direct response testing on steroids as employed by Upworthy. This company developed a method of rapidly testing subject lines that can tell Upworthy editors “exactly which packaging would have the biggest impact” and not untypically will test 75 variations. So how is rapid testing used by Contently? “We threw away the first 3 versions of Contently in a matter of months. We deleted the first set of users after about a month when we realized that we needed to screen writers and set different expectations than we had. Better to start fresh than to try to twist something that’s not working into something that is. “Now, we’re more methodical about our testing. We do online user testing of just about everything that we put on the website, so we know that people understand what we’re doing before we go live. We also anonymously track everything that happens on our platform down to the mouse movement and click, so instead of asking people whether they like a feature, we see whether the majority even use it. “We also do email split testing… It makes a huge difference in how many people pay attention to our content.” Experimental Time. Much has been written about the benefits of letting employees officially designate time to experiment with new ideas, such asGoogle GOOGL -2.21%’s 20% Time and 3M MMM -1.41%’s 15% Time. Snow makes the case that AdSense, Gmail and Post-It Notes all started off as side-projects and are all extremely helpful for consumers and worth billions of dollars to their companies. But how can start-ups like Contently afford to budget time for experiments in such early stages? And what does Contently’s Board think? “We can’t afford not to be dipping our toes in various waters at this stage. Research shows that companies that are willing to take 1-2 sidesteps from the original businessmodel are 2-3x more likely to succeed than those that stay the original course. That’s a huge incentive to budget time to experiment. In fact, the only reason we’re still in business is because we were willing to experiment with providing talent and tools for brand publishers (as opposed to just traditional media companies), and so we were in the metaphorical water when the content marketing wave came—and no one else was as prepared to capitalize on it as we were! “We certainly spend some money on experiments that don’t work, or things that won’t ever be profitable—such as our nonprofit arm for investigative journalism. But our board supports these because they trust that everything is in service of our mission to build a better media world, which if you want to look at from a capitalist perspective, gets us great loyalty from users, employees, and the market.”